“[F]undamentalists desperately want creationism and [intelligent design] to be true because they fear that if evolution is true and God did not create humans beings, then human life, including their individual lives, have no purpose whatsoever and there is no cosmic basis for their or anyone’s morality, so the world will decay into lawlessness, violence and chaos.”

“Cities that matter went for Kerry. I don’t feel estranged from my country. I don’t live in the United States of America; I live uptown in Island America. For gays and lesbians it’s not a contiguous land mass that stretches from sea to shining sea – it’s a chain of islands – it’s Indonesia. It’s an archipelago. You can hop from the island of Chicago or the island of New York or the island of San Francisco or the island of Seattle, but there’s a lot of places where you just can’t go. Just like there are a lot of places in America where it’s not great to be black.”

“For his entire adult life, John Roberts has been a disciple of and promoted a political and legal ideology that is antithetical to an America that embraces all, including lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people. He has denigrated the nature and scope of the constitutional rights to privacy, equal protection and due process as well as federal government’s role in confronting injustice. I have no doubt he’s an accomplished lawyer and an affable dinner companion, but that doesn’t make him any less a mortal danger to equal rights for gay people, reproductive freedom and affirmation action.”

“I may not agree with the [gay] lifestyle. And I don’t. But that has nothing to do with the civil rights of that member of our – that part of our constituency. … Housing and employment are not special rights. … I think the right to live somewhere and to live where you please or to work where you please, as long as you’re not bothering anybody else, is a basic right, not a – not a special right. … Civil rights for all Americans – black, white, red, yellow, the rich, poor, young, old, gay, straight, et cetera – is not a liberal or a conservative value. It’s an American value that I would think that we pretty much all agree on.”